


Recipes from Home

by odoridango



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon - Manga, Canon Compliant, Gen, Post-Female Titan Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-30
Updated: 2015-01-30
Packaged: 2018-03-09 16:37:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3256907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odoridango/pseuds/odoridango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean visits Eren after leave.</p><p>“Mothers are important,” Eren says simply.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recipes from Home

**Author's Note:**

> Was written for JE week.

The night after the Scouting Legion’s habitual post-expedition leave ends, Jean visits Eren for the first time. When he’d asked Captain Levi for permission that morning, the dour man had just given him a blank, sour look and told him to go before lights out, scribbled a short note, practically thrown it in Jean’s face, and proceeded to ignore him so hard that Jean felt as if he had no choice but to leave the room. No wonder Eren had always looked so high-strung in the rare glimpses Jean had seen of him on the training grounds.

Led to the basement room by one of the guards for the night, Jean can’t help but find the stone stairs and still, stale air somewhat daunting, swallows as he raises his lamp higher and starts the journey down.  It’s softly lit down there, by the two candles that sit on Eren’s bed stand. Eren’s bedroom is rather large, but bars demarcate its boundaries, and the chains around Eren’s wrists rattle as Eren turns a page in the book that he’s reading, mouthing along with the words. The bed he’s sitting on is really more of a straw pallet laid on top of a series of long wooden crates, though his pillow looks standard issue.

Eren looks up, wary, when he hears Jean’s footsteps, and recoils in shock.

“Jean?”  he says, surprised. “What are you doing here?”  He sets the book down in his lap, scoots across rumpled sheets towards the bars as best he can, the chains on his wrists beginning to pull taut.

“I went home over leave,” Jean explains, and watches Eren’s mouth pinch, flatten. Eren scrubs roughly at his eyes, makes a small noise of frustration. His nose and eyes are red, Jean notices.

“That doesn’t explain why you’re here,” Eren rasps, voice rough and frustrated.

“Jeez, some sense of hospitality you’ve got,” Jean grumbles, and throws a little package wrapped in brown paper at Eren, perfectly aimed to bounce off his fat forehead. The package rebounds onto the floor, and Eren scowls at him when he tries to reach for it, and is stopped by his chains.

“Look what you did, asshole,” he says, inordinately bitter. A loose fist hits the mattress, accompanied by a practiced sigh. “What the hell was in there?”

“Biscuits,” Jean says. “My mom made them, told me to share.”

“Momma’s boy,” Eren sneers, and the look on his face is ugly and dark.

“From what I’ve heard, you were one, too,” Jean snaps, and he knows it was the wrong thing to say because Eren turns his face away towards the wall, towards shadow. Elbows cradled in his hands, and he presses his lips together into a thin white line, refusing to speak. He sniffs, raises an arm to scrub at his eyes again.

Horrified, Jean realizes that Eren’s been crying, and hasn’t stopped. And why shouldn’t he? Few soldiers know the whole picture of what happened on the failed expedition, but it’s well known that Levi had emerged from the forest with Eren under the crook of one brawny arm, sodden and covered in a strange film, Mikasa at his side, and a broken leg for deadweight. None of the other members of the Special Operations Squad had returned with them.

“So what,” Eren says, still stubborn, and it’s like they never left the trainee barracks at all. “So what if we’re momma’s boys. Mothers are important, aren’t they? What’s wrong about caring about your mother?” He doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself, and the tears drip faster and faster down his cheeks, and he raises an arm and just puts it over his eyes, sniffs as his breath hitches a little with the onset of a sob. “What’s wrong about caring?”

 Jean knows all the romance books are wrong because no one he’s ever known cries pretty, and that includes Eren. His face is red and blotchy, the skin of his nose dry, snot beginning to dribble from his nostrils and tears wetting his face. It’s like he turned on a water faucet and let it leak all over him. His breath lodges in his throat, and his shoulder quiver as he cries, makes these little gasping, hiccupping sobs in between words, “Fuck,” he says miserably, and laughs, the sound dragging punctured and forlorn into the ugly space between him and Jean, “Fuck. I’m so jealous. That makes no sense.”

Jean’s first instinct is to ask Eren if he knows that there are plenty of other soldiers suffering the same way he is, but he’s very conscious of the package of biscuits lying forgotten on the floor because Eren’s chained inside a veritable cage, and that he’s confined because he’ll be returning to court in several weeks’ time, head back on the chopping block.

“Yeah, it doesn’t,” Jean says anyway.

“It doesn’t,” Eren echoes. “Fuck. I’m so selfish. _Fuck_.” He curls himself into this small ball, and falls back onto the pallet, waits for his tears to subside. The set of his shoulders is limp and hunched, and Jean recognizes it from when he used to mourn Marco, day and night.

“Jean,” Eren says, and the name jars him. Eren seldom calls him by his first name, prefers terms like Kirschstein, Asshole, Dumbass and Buttface. “Jean,” he says again, “Why are you here?”

Jean hesitates, for some reason, before reply. “Mom gave me too many biscuits,” he says slowly, feeling each word curl strangely tight about his tongue. “And for some reason, I wanted to share them.”

Eren snorts. “Fucking Mama’s boy.”

“Yeah,” Jean murmurs, watches as Eren sits back up, drying his tears as he must have done so many times before, before the barracks, before Trost, after Trost, Before and After. Eren Jaeger, the crybaby, he’d cried so much in the trainee program, and in this dark cell too, he cried and wiped up his own tears. “Yeah, thanks.”

“You should be. Mothers are important,” Eren says simply, and doesn’t try to reach for the biscuits again.


End file.
